While complex sorting mechanisms, conveyor systems, and other machinery are commonly involved in routing packages in the package delivery industry, many steps still exist where packages are handled by human package service providers who perform manual steps to properly route parcels to their intended destination. These steps may occur during any portion of the delivery process, but commonly occur while the package is being processed at a package delivery company hub. Here the packages can be routed to vehicles for transportation to another hub or sent to be loaded onto parcel delivery vehicles for final delivery at their destinations.
Often, a manual routing step requires that a human package service provider have detailed knowledge and/or experience regarding the package delivery and routing process. For example, a package service provider might be required to determine whether a package should be sent to a parcel delivery vehicle, or instead forwarded on to another hub based on the destination zip code found on the shipping label of the package. Another example would be a package service provider determining where on a package delivery vehicle to place a package once the proper delivery vehicle has been determined. Developing the knowledge to be able to make repeated determinations such as these can require substantial training. Even after adequate training, mistakes can occasionally occur that cause delays in package delivery times.
The training required for a package service provider to become efficient at his or her manual routing duties can be costly in terms of both time and money. In addition, the cost associated with this training becomes an obstacle to changes in delivery processes/operations. That is, hub processes tend to remain static where such manual steps are involved. Potentially beneficial process improvements that cannot provide a benefit greater than the cost of retraining affected package service providers are generally not implemented.
Additional package shipping data beyond that contained on a package shipping label itself commonly resides in one or more package shipping company databases, stored in one or more tables using the package tracking number as the primary key. This information can contain additional routing information that would ease the human memory burden on package service providers if the information were available to the package service providers. In addition, the information contained in the shipping company databases can be dynamic. That is, information regarding the package can change during the delivery process. For example, a customer may wish to receive a higher level of service than was previously indicated, or even send the package to a different address than was initially indicated.
However, providing all package service providers in a package delivery enterprise with access to the additional package shipping data in the database(s) would require that each of these employees be given, for example, a terminal that could retrieve information from the database(s) regarding a given package based on the package tracking number read from the package by reading a barcode or radio frequency identification tag. Unfortunately such equipment would be too expensive to be practicable. What is needed then is a relatively inexpensive device that dynamically displays information from a package delivery database in a human readable form on a package to provide routing and/or handling information.